Athlon 64 Overclocking

Overclocking 101 (Cont'd)

As a final example, we show a very high-end motherboard from ASUS, M2N32 SLI De Luxe, which provides a myriad of overclocking options, see Figures 6 to 8. First you need to enable overclocking by changing clock options from “auto” to manual” (see Figure 6). Then you need to perform the configurations we listed above.

Figure 6: CPU overclocking on a high-end motherboard (ASUS M2N32 SLI De Luxe).

On this motherboard we can lock the PCI Express at 100 MHz (see Figure 7) – which will also lock the Serial ATA clock – and also change the HyperTransport bus multiplier. This configuration should follow the rules published above.

Figure 7: CPU overclocking on a high-end motherboard (ASUS M2N32 SLI De Luxe).

As you can see in Figure 8, this motherboard provides a separated clock generator for the link between the north bridge (NB) and the south bridge (SB) chips. By default this clock generator is set as “Auto”, but we recommend you to lock it at its default rate, 200 MHz. The HyperTransport bus multiplier, here called “CPU<->NB HT Speed” (on other motherboards this option may use a different name, like “CPU<->nForce SPP”), should be changed from “Auto” to “5x”, and then to other rates depending on the base clock being used (see rules above).

Figure 8: HyperTransport clock multiplier configuration (ASUS M2N32 SLI De Luxe).

Now that you know the basics, you may be asking, “ok, what should I do now?” Let’s see in the next page.